Resolving conflicting Youtube accounts

Samantha Vardenega who last year gave a wonderful presentationGetting Started with Youtubewas asked about resolving issues around conflicting Youtube accounts. This problem occurred as the university transferred to using Google. After the workshop Samantha wrote to me explaining how to resolve the issue:

The problem you both have is known as conflicting accounts.

The issue originally occured because you can create a Google account using an existing (non-Google) email address. This lets you get a Google account without getting Gmail, by using an existing identity. Some of us did this with an RMIT address back before the Uni release Google Apps for staff. When Google Apps was released at RMIT, the conflicts occured because there existed 2 Google accounts with the same address.

What then happened was that the conflicted account (i.e. the old YouTube account)was renamed with a crazy looking address. This is Google’s way of temporarily solving the conflict.

There are two ways to permanently resolve the conflict (I’ll explain how to do this in a minute).

Change to an account with a Gmail address (eg. jane@gmail.com or another available gmail name)

Change to an account with a different email address (eg. use a jane@yahoo.com address)

Or you may just wish to delete the content in YouTube and then delete the account all together.

So… first thing is to get logged in to the old account.

Try using the steps below.

1. Open an Incognito window in Google Chrome (this will just ensure we don’t have issues with it logging into your real account)

2. Go to youtube.com and click Sign In. Use these instructions to determine the correct temporary address to sign in with (make sure you don’t sign in with your current RMIT address).

3. After you sign in you may get prompted to rename the account with a different email address, similar to what you see here. Or you can just leave it at the temporary address I believe.

There is a tool that allows you to move data from the conflicting account to your Google Apps (ie. RMIT) account. However, because YouTube is not enabled yet at RMIT, you probably won’t be able to do this.

At least one of the participants had success with this method, although I think it did take here a couple of goes.

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